한국의 1세대 중국문학 연구의 두 얼굴 ―정내동과 이명선

Abstract

Because of the cold war period, modern Chinese literary studies in Korea had been shelved for a long time. It was during the 1980s when China’s reform and open-door policy was under development that the studies on modern Chinese literature resumed in the Korean academic world. In this sense, it would be meaningful to excavate and reevaluate the achievements of Jung, Nae-dong and Lee, Myung-sun, who each produced many critiques and translations on modern Chinese literature. This may help not only because it could restore the history of studies on modern Chinese literature of Korea, but also because it might complement the international context of modern Korean literature. Although Jung and Lee were contemporaneous with each other, their attitudes and point of views toward the literary world of contemporary China were extremely different. While the anarchist Jung grasped it under the belletristic bias, Lee, a Marxist, understood it from the viewpoint of revolutionary literature. For Jung, who was involved in the anarchist student group in Beijing, anarchism seemed to become a guide to criticize both nationalist and Marxist literature according to the criteria of belletrism. On the contrary, Lee’s views on Chinese literature were influenced by a Japanese professor, Karashima Takeshi, who worked at Keijō Imperial University at that time as well as some critiques of Japanese left-wing intellectuals that had been published on Kaisō and Bungei in the 1930s. By reconsidering these two different streams of studies on modern Chinese literature in Korea from the 1930s to the 1940s, it is expected that a new horizon of comparative studies between Korean and Chinese literature will open up.